Abilene, Kansas and Snowfall

Before I became a father, I held no picture of what fatherhood might be.
No mental rehearsal, no childhood memories of cradling babies in a bustling family tree. I’d been a camp counselor and a swim instructor during those sunburned college summers—jobs where kids are delightful storms passing through—but I had never lived with a small child, never been someone’s anchor or shelter. Then my son was born, and I learned, very quickly, what I hadn’t even thought to imagine: a child is not simply something you take care of. A child rearranges your sense of self. He becomes a soft, wandering piece of your heart, moving through the world in a body far more vulnerable than your own. Suddenly you are exposed in ways you didn’t know the human chest could open. By 2012, he was three.
We lived in a modest Los Angeles duplex—a place that creaked in the right places and smelled faintly of eucalyptus from the trees leaning in over the fence. My wife (now ex) was pouring her energy into opening a Pilates studio in Beverly Hills. I was auditioning where I could, picking up day jobs to stitch together the weeks, while also fulfilling the duties of a stay-at-home Dad. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel both hopeful and slightly underwater—like a swimmer confident in his strokes but unsure where the shoreline is. The year before, in 2011, a regional theater audition in Memphis, Tennessee had carried me all the way to Abilene, Kansas, of all places, for a season of summer stock. Abilene, a place I didn’t know existed until I found myself stepping onto its flat, open land, had welcomed me with the kind of quiet sincerity small towns specialize in. At the Great Plains Theatre, housed in an old limestone church with stained-glass windows that caught the morning sun like liquid amber, I performed in Smoke on the Mountain. It was one of those rare sets of creative conditions that makes you think: Yes. I would come back here. I would do this again. And so when the theatre invited me the following winter to reprise the role in a sequel, Sanders Family Christmas, I said yes. It meant being away from home and family for Thanksgiving and the entire Christmas season. But actors learn early that opportunity often comes wearing inconvenient clothes. I convinced myself that this counted as “real work,” the kind my spouse had been urging me toward. So I packed my bag, kissed my son’s warm head, and let the prairie call me back. Abilene in December feels like a postcard someone forgot to write on—endless sky, breath-frosting cold. It’s known for a multitude of antique stores full of cast-iron toys and heirlooms from families who had stayed rooted to the plains across generations. I loved those stores. As a lifelong aviation buff, I gravitated to the little cast-iron airplanes—hard, weighty things shaped like the dreams of the 1940s. I bought five or six of them to hang from my son’s ceiling, imagining him drifting to sleep beneath a squadron of flight. Something for him to open on Christmas morning. Rehearsals blurred into performances, and the show felt like a warm quilt stitched from returning castmates, gospel harmonies, and an audience ready for Christmas cheer. Small-town December has its own gravity. You feel yourself pulled inward—toward lighted windows, familiar faces, shared songs. I let myself lean into it. We closed on December 23rd, a night when Abilene exhaled snow in slow, meditative spirals. Big, heavy flakes—the kind that fall with purpose. The cast party was at Ike’s, a local bar named for the town’s most famous son, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The music grew louder as the night deepened, and I found myself stepping outside to breathe in the cold, thinking ahead to my early-morning ride to the Kansas City airport. Doug, our stage manager, stood by the door, snow collecting on his coat shoulders like he’d been dusted with powdered sugar. We exchanged a warm “Merry Christmas,” the kind that feels like a benediction when spoken under falling snow. My phone buzzed. It was my wife: Call me when you get back to your room. I imagined the conversation: plans for my arrival the next day, last-minute Christmas logistics, my son running down the hallway into my arms. I walked through the quiet streets, the snow hushing even my thoughts, back to my small basement apartment—four walls that suddenly felt too thin to hold what was coming. When I called, her voice was steady. She told me that when I returned to Los Angeles the next day—Christmas Eve—she wanted me to move out. Not immediately, she said, but soon. She told me she’d been unhappy for years. That my time away had clarified things for her. The snow outside had softened the whole town into stillness. Her words erased the rest. I sat on the edge of that narrow bed in Abilene, the glow from the streetlamp leaking through the blinds, trying to make sense of something that refused to resolve itself. We had been together twelve years. Married for seven. And though we had been struggling, I had believed that distance would make the heart remember. Instead, it had made hers decide. The night passed in fragments. A kind of feverish waking dream where every version of the future collapsed in on itself. At four a.m., I rolled my suitcase through the snow and climbed into the car of the theater’s accountant. He was my ride. He assumed I was hungover from the cast party. I let him believe that. Heartbreak is easier to misinterpret than explain. At the Kansas City airport, I sat on the carpeted floor and played “The Holly and the Ivy” on my mandolin, over and over, the notes falling like thin winter branches. I don’t remember boarding, don’t remember landing—just the blur of terminal lights and the low hum of engines drowning out thought. Los Angeles was warm when I arrived, too warm for Christmas. The kind of December heat that makes holiday lights look faintly embarrassed. My mother and brother were waiting—they had come for Christmas that year. Later I learned that my wife had told them about the impending split before she told me. At the time, I simply felt…disoriented. As if I were showing up late to a story everyone else had begun reading without me. I stepped into our living room. The Christmas tree glowed. Candles flickered in the draft from the old windows. The air smelled like pine and sugar. And I felt like an intruder in my own home. My son sat on my wife’s lap, hesitant. A month is an ocean to a three-year-old. His memory, at that age, was a short trail of breadcrumbs. I was a stranger again. I sat down on the shaggy rug in front of the tree, shoeless, unsure if I was meant to participate in the conversation or disappear into the wallpaper. Everyone chatted politely about everything except the thing that hung silently over all of us. And then it happened. My son slid down from her lap, padded across the rug, and climbed into me. Not onto my lap—into it. Into me. As if he had just remembered where home was. Silently he tucked himself against my chest with the full, unfiltered trust that only a child can give. His small arms curled in front of him, pressing into my ribs. His breath warmed my shirt. He molded himself into the shape of us—father and son, recognizing each other again. It was a moment so pure, so unadorned, that everything else—past, future, dread, heartbreak—fell away. For that brief, miraculous breath of time, the world narrowed to a single point of connection: You’re Dad. I remember now. Someone snapped a photo. It remains the truest record of my life. The years that followed were long, tangled, and full of painful paperwork. The divorce stretched on for years, the court proceedings heavy and bewildering. Her reasons for ending our relationship became more evident as it became clear that she’d rekindled a relationship out of state. Eventually, she was granted a move-away to Wisconsin, taking our son across state lines and out of my daily life. It felt archaic, senseless—like a verdict written in a language I couldn’t translate. But time, stubborn as prairie wind, wears down even the sharpest edges. And life, despite itself, moves forward. Now it’s late November, 2025. Thirteen years since that winter in Abilene. My son is sixteen—taller, funnier, wiser than I ever was at his age. In a few days he’ll fly to Seattle. We’ll get our Christmas tree in the mountains, see The Nutcracker, drink eggnog, and laugh with my partner and her mother. And yes—my current partner was also in the cast of Smoke on the Mountain and Sanders Family Christmas. Life has a way of looping back, offering second chances through familiar doorways. Whether we talk about it or not my son and I carry that moment from the rug in our bones. Even now, with all the miles between us, there’s a quiet understanding built from that single act of climbing into my arms. It is the place where the story did not break—it rooted. I’ve grown softer in the holidays again. I’ve forgiven her timing. I’ve stopped asking the snow to explain itself. This year I’ve already baked for friends, put up decorations early, worn my holiday sweater, and watched an old recording of A Christmas Carol that I performed years ago. I play carols on the piano each morning, letting the season seep into me like warm rum through oak. Because here’s what I’ve learned: The holidays can hurt. They can be misused. They can reopen old wounds with the gentleness of sandpaper. But they also hold space for small, holy things— things that steady us, things that warm the cold parts, things that glow even after the candles burn out. A child climbing into your lap. A partner humming in the kitchen. A friend handing you a mug of something warm. A quiet moment when the world, however briefly, feels survivable. I hope, wherever you are, that the season offers you one of those moments— something tender, unmistakably kind,
something that reminds you what love is capable of weathering
and what remains when the snow finally melts. Happy Thanksgiving.
And Merry Christmas